A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about the books where I really enjoyed the romance plot line. I spoke about the struggle I have with romance in books at times so I tried to do a more positive post. But there is two sides to every story and today I will be discussing the romance plotlines that just didn’t work for me. Most of the books I will be talking about I actually like the story as a whole but was just disappointed or left underwhelmed by the romance in them.

I really enjoyed this book. I remember it was a main topic of conversation in the book community for months. In this we are introduced to two romance plot lines. One between the characters Amari and Tzain, I really enjoyed watching their budding romance develop. I felt it was done really well and I looked forward to more scenes of them together but I did not enjoy the romance between the main character and Zelie and Inan.

Sadly, this romance felt really rushed to me and felt underdeveloped. Especially, when you compared it to Amari and Tzain’s romance. I was just left wanting more.

If you have been round long enough, you will know I am not a big fan of this book. To me the structuring of the book was not great, you can read my thoughts about this book here.

One of things that made me struggle with the book was the romance. I personally did not connect to this romance at all, I think this partially comes down to the fact that I wasn’t the biggest fan of the main character. I genuinely just didn’t care what happened to this couple. The author really tries to make you care for them and I really struggled to. Plus they were sadly accompanied with cringey dialogue which didn’t help.

Now I actually enjoyed this book. There was some good LGBTQ+ and mental health rep and overall a solid debut but the main romance in this just didn’t work for me. Check out my review here.

I think this mainly came down to the fact that I struggled to connect to Caylus, the male love interest, he felt like an underdeveloped character and I couldn’t fully understand why the main character liked him as much as she did. He honestly felt quite bland to me as a character.

This was a recent 5 star review for me. It had a lot going for it and while I don’t hate the romance in it I didn’t love it. You can check out my full review here.

The actual romance itself was fine, I thought they had chemistry but my problem was more with the male love interest who apart from one small moment I feel is actually unnecessary to the story. I feel like you could have cut him out of the story as a whole and worked a way to include what he contributed in a different way and it would of worked just as well.